Optional: Your camera may have settings that you can adjust. If you want you can set your camera so that the film image matches the size of the YouTube image: 480 X 360. This is quite a small setting and you will find it reduces your file sizes considerably.

Note: At present YouTube will only let you upload films that are less than 10 minutes long. So don't make a feature film. Keep it short. Also film files tend to be very big and your computer may take forever to import, export and edit the films. For the point of learning 5 or 10 second clips are best.

I took a series of very short clips of my silly dog:

Copy your film clips into a folder on your computer: Camera to Computer

Open the folder on the computer and: View the Clips

Note: Normally you can just double click on the files and they will open in the default Video Viewer.

My Clips open in Quick Time.

Decide which clips you want to use and in which order you want to view them. You do not need to use a complete clips, you can use a sections or several sections of one or more clips.

If you want create a simple: Story Board

Note: Planning your movie is important because the file sizes tend to be very large and it takes the computer a lot of processing power to do even simple edits. So the more thinking you can do before you get to Flash the better.

Copy the files that you want to use to a new: Editing Folder

If you wish, rename the files so that they are ordered correctly: Rename

Note: The length of my little movie clips listed below are between 3 seconds and 6 seconds, yet the file sizes are very large. My camera (on the default setting) stores films at 2MB per second! So a 60 second film would be 120MB and 10 minute film would be over a Gigabyte!

My renamed Files copied to a new folder.

My files are AVI format. You may find that your files are a different file format. It does not matter what format your camera saves in. The dimensions of my movie clips is 640 x 480 pixels. This is bigger than the default YouTube size and at this stage is not important.